


Couples Eat Free

by JauntyHako



Series: Les Misérables Fake Relationships [1]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/F, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Pretending to be in love with your crush for free chocolate, Valentine's Day Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-08
Updated: 2020-10-08
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:20:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26897338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JauntyHako/pseuds/JauntyHako
Summary: Éponine doesn't look a gift horse in the mouth. And she'll stop at nothing to get at said gift horse, up to and including pretending to date Cosette.
Relationships: Cosette Fauchelevent/Éponine Thénardier
Series: Les Misérables Fake Relationships [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1962487
Comments: 1
Kudos: 31





	Couples Eat Free

**Author's Note:**

> This started as a way to distract me from the pain editing my Star Wars AU is. It ended as a full blown series, with only two entries left to write and (ugh) edit.  
> Hope you enjoy

Éponine had learned to be frugal the first time she had to make her allowance stretch for food and shampoo after her parents had left on a spontaneous trip and not returned until a week later. Some of her childhood friends prided themselves on working hard for their money and not falling into crime, talking about dignity and virtue and proving the people wrong who assumed that the poor were criminal.   
Éponine didn't care about the opinions of others, nor did living with people like her parents lend much to dignity and virtue, and she was proud of surviving as a thief, con-artist, fraudster, and all-around criminal. She did what had to be done, and although in the years since she grew up and got a decently paying job she hadn't needed to fall back on her old tricks often, they still guided her eyes, made her smell opportunity when others would see nothing.

“It's completely legal, I promise,” she said over coffee one Monday morning, the snow outside making the warm coffee in here all the more enjoyable. Doubly so since Cosette was paying for it.   
“I've heard that before,” Cosette said, virtuous doubt sitting perfectly on her brow, her pursed lips giving at once the impression of deserved disapproval and tempting invitation. Éponine was under no illusion that Cosette would frown even harder if Éponine kissed her right now, and she would almost certainly not agree to her proposal.  
“This time it's true. Look, no one can prove we're not together, right? I mean, you don't have to be married to be in a relationship, right? So how would they even check?”  
Cosette was not convinced, Éponine could tell. Her oldest friend, separated from her for years and then returned to her life like an unexpected rainbow after a fall of rain, knew her better than most people. Cosette was not like Éponine. She was not like any of her friends, even those who claimed to denounce a life of crime.   
Evidenced by that were Cosette's next words, that would have sounded downright laughable out of everyone else's mouth: “It feels dishonest.”  
She stirred her spoon in her cup of tea, some kind of fruit tea that mixed perfectly with her sweet perfume and turned Éponine's head into cotton. She had to take a sip of her coffee just to clear her mind. She'd always been helpless around Cosette, but at least she more or less functioned.   
“Nonsense. We're not doing anything wrong. Look, I do this all the time with Parnasse-”  
“That's not a good argument.”  
It was not. Éponine backtracked.  
“I mean, I never do this with Parnasse because I only do crimes with him and this is not a crime. It's just dinner, Coco. Businesses come up with their little gimmicks to attract customers, and for Valentine's day it's Couples Eat Free. They want people coming into their restaurant. Really, we're doing them a favour.”  
Cosette smiled at Éponine's obvious lie, just as she knew she would. For all that she could look so sad sometimes, it was easy to make Cosette smile. Éponine was the least funny person she knew, but she could say anything and Cosette would laugh and smile. Obviously their shared friends exaggerated when they said it was difficult to make Cosette laugh.   
“Alright,” she said. “I'll pretend to be your girlfriend for Valentine's day so you get free food.”  
Éponine did a little fist-bumping motion.  
“Yes! Thank you, Cosette, you won't regret this. I'll text you the details. Keep your day free.”  
She got up, slipped on her jacket, eager to get all the Valentine's day's promotions sorted out before the big day. Cosette looked up from her tea, almost empty. She was looking worried again.  
“My day? You mean my whole day?”  
“Free brunch, free lunch, free dinner. Plus whatever else I can cram in there,” Éponine quickly added as she saw Cosette at the verge of objection: “You already said yes. No takebacks!”  
Cosette's laughter followed her all the way down the street. 

Éponine had wanted to meet Cosette at their first stop for the day – couple's brunch at a queer café – but Cosette texted the night before and asked if it was okay if she came over to Éponine's place before. Éponine had thrown a casual thumbs-up emoji back and then spent the entire night cleaning her flat from top to bottom.

When the doorbell rang, Éponine was running on four hours of sleep, a thermos of Irish coffee, and the fumes from cleaning products she hadn't touched since she moved in. She figured, considering these circumstances, she was forgiven for staring. A little.  
Cosette had made an effort. She always looked like the flowergirl at a wedding, with her flowing dresses and adorable knitwear, but this morning she looked like she had escaped from a fairytale book. In her hands, wrapped in white and pink paper she held a bouquet of flowers.   
She held them out to Éponine, who took them in a daze, staring down at them half expecting something terrible to leap out. But that was not Cosette's style.  
“I thought,” Cosette said. “I saw them at the florist's and I thought, if we do this, we should do it right. Right?”  
“Right,” echoed Éponine and it was around that time that she realised she stood in the doorway like a dumbass watching the snow melt on Cosette's coat.  
“Come in. I'm almost ready. Do you want ... tea?”  
Éponine didn't drink tea. Jehan might have left her some a few weeks ago. If he hadn't Éponine was fully prepared to sprint down to the store below her flat and buy some, possibly climbing down the fire escape to not make it look like she was going out of her way for Cosette. Which she didn't. Definitely.  
“No, thank you,” Cosette said as she took off her coat, not noticing Éponine's relieved sigh. “I think the idea for today is to drink couples only tea?”  
“Heh,” made Éponine, confronted with the fact that Cosette looked even more fancy under that coat, with a dainty waistcoat and frilly blouse. It dawned on Éponine that she wouldn't get away with wearing jeans and a leather jacket.   
“Make yourself at home,” Éponine said over her shoulder, hurrying into the bathroom, throwing out her initial plans for her hair and trying to remember where she'd put her makeup. Lipstick was right out, she'd end up looking like the Joker. Maybe some mascara? That idea crumbled just like the mascara she pulled out of her cabinet. The hair thing at least was easy. She'd planned on just putting it in a ponytail but she was actually not bad at braiding and managed to get it into a passable sidebraid with minimal fuss. It at least gave the impression that she had put some thought into her appearance. People wouldn't think she was Cosette's weird hobo-friend.   
They might still not believe that they were together, Cosette was radiant after all and Éponine could be most charitably described as “shifty looking”, but Éponine had planned for this eventuality. If anyone questioned their relationship status she'd simply insinuate that the people making the accusation had problematic views of what a lesbian couple should look like, and the ensuing awkwardness might score them some extra freebies. 

She relayed this plan to Cosette when she returned to the living room, trying to decide between a black dress shirt with matching tie and her usual go-to which was her least ratty flannel.   
“I'd rather not make people feel bad,” Cosette said as she turned around. “That's actually why I came, I thought we could- oh.”  
Éponine looked up, startled by Cosette falling suddenly silent.   
“What?”  
“You're ... you, you ... you're in your bra, uh-”  
Éponine looked down at herself.   
“Yeah? Is that a problem?”  
“No!” Cosette squeaked and turned back around on the sofa, staring straight ahead, eyes darting towards Éponine as she sat at the edge of the sofa.  
“I'd be underdressed in the flannel, right? But maybe the dress shirt is too much? Maybe if I leave out the tie ...”  
“I like the flannel,” Cosette said softly. “It brings out your eyes.”  
“It does?”  
Cosette nodded. Her cheeks were red, probably from coming out of the cold into Éponine's heated flat.   
“Flannel it is,” Éponine said and threw the dress shirt unceremoniously over the coffee table, resolving to tidy up later. While buttoning up she picked up the conversation again.  
“What were you about to say? About why you came here?”  
“Oh, right.” Cosette looked at her again, or rather at her buttoning her shirt, causing Éponine to check twice if she had accidentally missed a button. “I thought we could practice?”  
“Practice what?” The last button defied her. Éponine turned towards a rougher approach, trying to get it through the button hole with force.  
“You know, being a couple. Like how would we even kiss?”  
The button snapped off. It landed with a soft pling somewhere never to be found again, leaving Éponine with her hands empty, her mouth open, and her train of throughts stopped in its tracks. Cosette had followed the flight trajectory of the button and got up.  
“Oh, I can get that-”  
“What?”  
“I said, I can get that.”  
“No, not that,” Éponine blinked, hands still in the position they had been in, around her neck, holding one half of her collar between her thumb and forefinger, the other closed around an invisible button. She watched as Cosette lowered herself to the floor in her fancy tights and dress, searching for the button. Never in her entire life had Éponine be so grateful about having vacuumed recently. She felt like she had a shock reaction. Everytime she tried to think about what Cosette had said, her mind engaged emergency measures and forced her to think of things like buttons and vacuuming, things that wouldn't make her head explode.   
“Kissing?” Éponine said, bypassing her brain, hoping that whatever she used to think right now wouldn't get her into trouble.  
“Yes. I mean, people will know we're just friends if we're awkward about kissing each other, right? So, I thought, we could practice here and get used to it. We should probably also try to come up with pet names for each other, to make it more realistic.”  
Whatever organ had replaced Éponine's higher brain functions thought that was a great idea. She began to suspect that the organ was in fact a muscle and that it hurt because she was using it so rarely. Certainly never to make decisions.  
“Okay. Uh, thanks.”  
Cosette smiled at her, little crow's feet at her eyes, her pearly white teeth showing as she held out the button to Éponine. She took it, felt it warm and heavier than it should be inside her hand and pocketed it, having an image in her mind of remembering it in a few months or whenever another situation called for her Good Flannel.   
“How should we do this?”  
“I don't know,” Cosette sat back on the sofa, decidedly closer to Éponine than she had been a minute ago. “I guess, we just go for it?”  
Right. That seemed sensible. Éponine's substitute thinking organ directed her attention to Cosette's lips, which were pink and glossy, her upper lip almost as full as her lower, turned up into the faintest smile.  
“Won't I mess up your lipstick?” Éponine said, aware that her voice had dropped several levels of volume and made up for it by rising an octave or two.  
“I have good setting spray.”  
Éponine did not know what setting spray was and could not offer argument. She should lean forward, do as Cosette said, just go for it. Kiss her, practice it. Cosette had been right. If this had come up in public, their story would have immediately collapsed. Éponine found herself getting closer to Cosette without any input from herself, close enough to see the speckles of gold in Cosette's brown eyes, close enough to smell her perfume, close enough to feel her breath ghosting warm over her cheek.  
“My lips are pretty chapped,” she whispered, half warning, half objection.  
“That's okay,” Cosette said and then they were kissing. Éponine was sure neither of them had moved but here she was, Cosette's lips on hers, chaste and soft, a barely there pressure. Her heart thrumming through ther veins, the tips of her fingers hot, needing something to touch and before Éponine could form a conscious thought, she had found the back of Cosette's neck, a hint of pressure that made Cosette lean in further and part her lips, catching Éponine's bottom lip between hers in an act as gentle as no one had ever treated any part of Éponine before. She wanted to laugh, wanted to cry, wanted to throw herself in Cosette's lap, and see if the rest of her was as soft as her lips and the tiny coily baby hairs at her nape.   
It felt like this was her first kiss, or rather how everyone thought their first kiss ought to be, full of warmth and passion and an inescapable need for the moment to never end. Wishing time could stand still, forgetting to breathe, eyes dropping closed so the entire world was reduced to the touch of lips and skin.   
Éponine had kissed Montparnasse dozens of times for their annual Valentine's days freebie tour. It had never felt like this. It had never been like this. Like it was real.  
Oh no.

They broke apart, Éponine's flushed cheeks matching Cosette's, her hand still on her neck, but somehow Cosette had found a way under her shirt, fingers ghosting over her skin just over her waistband. Her hand might have slipped, but she left burning trails when she drew away.   
Éponine blinked, the world slowly coming back into focus, allowing things other than Cosette in. Like, as a completely unrelated example, the fact that it was ten o'clock in the morning and she had an entire day of nothing but this ahead of her.  
She was in such deep shit.  
“Was that convincing, you think?”  
Debating whether calling this whole thing off would make it incredibly obvious what that kiss had done to her, it took Éponine a while to realise Cosette had asked her a question.   
“Uh, yeah.” She cleared her throat, sure that Cosette had to hear how that one kiss had ruined her, sure that she was being painfully obvious. “For, uh, someone who doesn't know we're just friends, of course.”  
“Oh. Of course.”  
She had to get out of this strange heady dreamspace, with Cosette still too close, lips parted slightly, looking like an invitation that it wasn't. Éponine stood up abruptly, startling Cosette who looked up at her out of big brown eyes.  
“Right,” Éponine said and then again, pulling down her shirt, brushing nonexistent dust off her knees. “Right. Shall we head out?”  
Cosette was smiling again and the twisting coil in Éponine's gut settled into something manageable.

When they discussed pet names on their way to the café, Éponine could almost tell herself that the kiss had been just a fluke. They were back to their usual banter, comfortable and familiar, no different from the conversation they'd had a week ago about what their dinosaur names would be.  
“Honeybun?”  
“Too cliché.”  
“Dear?”  
“Too British Period Drama.”  
“Babe?”  
They both shuddered.  
“Ugh, no.” Éponine shook her head, kicked an empty coke can in the general direction of a trash can – her good deed for the day – as she threw out an idea of her own.  
“Why don't we each decide what we'd like to be called and then we just go with that?”  
Cosette gave it some thought.  
Then she said, leaning in towards Éponine, in a conspiratorial tone: “Even if it's weird?”  
Éponine laughed in surprised delight. She should have guessed that Cosette, who kept trying to get Éponine into the kind of novels that had a butch lesbian and a femme lesbian badly photoshopped on the cover, had a favourite pet name.   
“Come on, you're talking to me. As if I ever did normal.”  
Cosette chuckled and linked her arm with Éponine's, leaning against her arm in something that would definitely serve to sell the whole couple look. Éponine, although hyperaware of Cosette's warmth and weight against her arm, couldn't help but be proud of Cosette's commitment to their ruse.   
“Okay. There's this book I read years ago. Just after we reconnected, actually. It was this queer retelling of Aladdin, right, with a girl Aladdin falling in love with Jasmine. She'd climb on the rose trellises to Jasmine's room at night, like sneaky thieves in books always do, and she'd always call her princess, because that's what she was, but I thought it was super cute. The story kind of stuck with me-” Cosette looked at Éponine, a quick darting glance. “I don't know why. But I thought, you kow, if I get to pick my own pet name ...”  
“Princess it is,” Éponine said and just like that she made Cosette smile again.   
It left Éponine mulling over her own preferred pet-noun. She'd never spent much time thinking about relationships, or always removed from the tiny details that Cosette loved so much. She thought of the whole thing in terms of “anything but like my parents” and “no men, except maybe Montparnasse” and “don't fall in love with someone way outside your league, Éponine, what are you thinking, are you masochistic or what?”. The idea of Cosette calling her cutesy petnames felt so at odds with the world Éponine knew – in which she was a felon to be and Cosette the girl who could make the sun rise with her smile – that her brain refused to cook up specifics.   
“Ponpon?”  
“Hmm?” Generic terms just wouldn't do, not after Cosette had shared something so sweet about herself like wanting to be called princess like the heroine in a fairy tale. In the kinds of books Éponine read petnames weren't huge on the list.  
“I mean, that's what I could call you. As a pet name.”  
Éponine looked down at Cosette's blinding smile, her cheek resting lightly against the sleeve of Éponine's jacket.   
“You already call me Ponpon,” Éponine said, doubting. “Won't it be too casual?”  
Cosette ducked her head, hiding her nose in her scarf.  
“It's cute. It'll be fine, I think. Unless you want something else?”  
“Ponpon's fine,” Éponine said, knowing full well once Cosette called her that as a girlfriend, even a fake one, she'd never be able to hear the petname again without her heart breaking into a thousand tiny little pieces. 

They reached the café shortly after, and as Éponine promised a big chalkboard proclaimed that couples would get free dessert.   
“Oh, dessert!” Cosette exclaimed and Éponine melted into a gooey puddle.   
They had bruschetta to satisfy the place's main course requirement and then went to town on a whole chocolate cake, about the diameter of Éponine's forearm, and meant to serve a group of six.   
“First rule of freebie hunting, always order the biggest thing on the menu, and take home the leftovers.” Éponine said with her mouth full, gesturing with her fork. A small piece of chocolate flew off the prongs and across the table, landing on Cosette's cheek. “Oh, sorry.”   
Cosette made a motion to wipe it away but didn't quite reach. Without thinking Éponine leaned over the table and brushed her thumb over Cosette's cheek. Halfway through the motion, Cosette's skin velvet soft and her eyes widened in surprise, the ceiling lamps painting specks of light into her irises, Éponine stilled, unable to finish this very simple thing, unable to do anything but look in Cosette's eyes and wonder if whatever supernatural entity interfered in her life had meant to do her a favour or slowly kill her from the inside. How had she never realised that she was in love with Cosette? How had she gone through life, always looking forward to their weekly coffee-dates, never realising that that was what she wanted them to be?   
When Cosette had moved into her own place, lamenting all the cute ideas she had for it that she could not afford to realise, and Éponine had spent three days on a dealhunting bender, which included but was not limited to delivering weed all over the city for a friend who had some spare wallpaper that she knew Cosette would love, it had still gone over her head how much of her motivation was not due to friendly interest.   
“Ponpon?”   
Cosette's voice rose barely above a whisper, a breath the shape of Éponine's name, but powerful enough to set her in motion again, finish her altogether not casual contact with Cosette's skin, brushing away the speck of chocolate.  
She thought someone passed their table, it was the only explanation for Cosette to reach up and take her hand in his, leaning her head into Éponine's palm.   
“You're very pretty,” she said, and Éponine realised that the person she thought had passed their table was in fact standing in front of it. It was the waitress, looking down at the two-thirds of leftover chocolate cake. The world, like a train leaving the station in jolting motions, gathering up speed, came back into focus.  
“Didn't quite finish that, did you?” the waitress said, but she was smiling. Because of Cosette's quick thinking, her gesture and compliment, the waitress didn't smell the scam. And because this was still Éponine's idea and she couldn't let Cosette do all the work, she laid the sweetness on thick.  
“She's always like this. I always say to her, you can't finish a whole cake in one sitting, and we always end up ordering the whole cake.”  
Cosette picked up smoothly from where Éponine left off.  
“We'll just take the rest home with us, if that's okay?”  
She directed the question at Éponine, which was a pro move if there ever was one.  
“Anything for my princess,” Éponine said and, in a burst of creativity, placed a cheeky little kiss on Cosette's hand.  
If anything they might have overdone it. When they left the café, they had not only the leftover cake, but two to-go cups of hot chocolate as well.  
“That was quick thinking” Éponine said, wiping away her chocolate milk beard. “When you called me pretty in front of the waitress. Made the whole thing super realistic.”  
In response she got an incredulous stare. Éponine looked down at herself, then wiped her hand over her face.   
“Do I have something on my face?”  
Cosette sighed, and linked their arms together again.  
“No,” she said, sounding for some reason disappointed.

Their next stop was a nail salon, where couples getting a manicure got a full set of nails for free if they chose a matching look. They argued good-naturedly over the designs, and Cosette delivered a full speech on manicure fashion trends over the last hundred years before Éponine realised she was bullshitting her. She laughed and soon Cosette was laughing, too, in that shy ladylike way she did when she was in public, hiding her laughter behind her hand and casting her eyes downwards.  
“You almost had me. I can't believe I didn't catch on when you claimed nail art was part of the official uniform of firefighters in the sixties.”  
“Love makes you gullible.”  
Éponine blinked.   
“Wh-”  
Then she saw the manicurist standing close by waiting for them to make their choice.  
“It sure does,” she said, perhaps a little louder than necessary and winked at Cosette. 

The day turned to noon, then afternoon as Cosette and Éponine made their way through the city arm in arm, checking off Éponine's itinerary. They went to three different restaurants in the span of an hour, eating as little as they could get away with and taking home bags full of leftovers. Between restaurant five and café four they stopped by Montparnasse's place to temporarily store their perishables and ease the load on their arms. When Éponine told Cosette that Montparnasse was sick in bed, the reason she had asked Cosette to replace him in their Valentine's Day tradition, Cosette insisted on buying his favourite coffee from the place down the street.  
“Hey shithead,” Éponine said when Montparnasse opened the door, earning a disapproving elbow in the side from Cosette.   
“Be nice to your friend,” she scolded then turned to Montparnasse, handing him the coffee cup. He took it, eyeing it like a twenty page contract written entirely in fine print.  
“What's this?” he said as Éponine shouldered her way past him into his flat, going straight for the kitchen. As expected his fridge was nearly empty, its contents consisting of a half carton of eggs, a carton of milk, and some suspicious looking celery. She heard Cosette overwhelm Montparnasse with casual expressions of affection in the other room.  
“It's coffee, to make you feel better.”  
“Uh-huh.”  
“Go, sit down. You should rest when you're ill, you know. But I like that you are still very nicely dressed, I can never get out of my pyjamas when I'm sick.”  
“Uh-huh?”  
“Go on, rest. Are you cold? Let me feel your temperature, oh you're freezing, poor thing. How about I make you a nice hot water bottle?”  
“Uh ... what?”

When Cosette came into the kitchen Éponine had finished putting their loot away. She looked over her shoulder at Cosette going through the cabinets as she looked for a hot water bottle. Jesus, she really was going to make him one. And that after Éponine had looked through the bins finding not a single used tissue, not one empty packet of cold medicine, and Montparnasse fully dressed, sitting on the couch, watching TV.  
She left Cosette to her search, intending to capitalise on the time it gave her alone with Montparnasse.  
“You want to tell me why you lied to me about being sick?”  
She threw herself on the sofa's backrest, nearly startling Montparnasse into a heart attack. He jerked around, hand pressed to his heart, an accusing look on his face. The face of a man who had been caught and was about to shift the blame like he was being paid for it.  
“Like you're so innocent-”  
“That's not the point.”   
She poked him in the chest, gestured in the general direction of where Cosette was.  
“Why ditch me? We do this every year-”  
“Exactly. Isn't it time you do it with someone you actually care about? Don't tell me you didn't enjoy yourself.”  
Éponine gaped like a fish on dry land. The nerve of this guy! The fact that she had, in fact, enjoyed herself immensely was beside the point. She certainly wouldn't let him know that, that lying, scheming, manipulative little shit.  
“You put the idea in my head that I should ask Cosette, because you think I'm in love with her,” she said. She tried to keep her voice low to avoid being overheard but felt it rising with every syllable she spoke. “Well, your plan backfired. No, you know what, it was never going to work in the first place. She's out of my league. And even if there ever was a chance, which there is not, today isn't it. In case you hadn't noticed, this entire day is nothing but a fluke!”  
She expected Montparnasse to rise to the argument. Instead he put his head in his hands and said her name, slow and defeated.  
“What?” she snapped, turned around to see where he was pointing at and finding Cosette in the doorway, the hot water bottle held to her chest, looking for some inexplicable reason hurt.  
Éponine didn't understand it. She went through the conversation in her head, wondered how much Cosette had heard, what in that whole mess could have hurt her feelings. Then the penny dropped. Of course. How could she have been so stupid?  
Cosette thought that Éponine had orchestrated the whole thing to manipulate Cosette into doing couple-y things to satisfy her own crush, when they both knew full well that Cosette would never have consented to this had she been aware of all the facts. It had to look like that to Cosette, it had to look bad. Éponine cursed, dragging her hands through her braid, falling apart just like the rest of her.  
“This isn't ... I mean, there's nothing going on here-” she said, a pathetic attempt at an explanation. “Look, we're just friends, right? And we're just doing this as friends, like Parnasse and I usually do. I really don't want anything more to come of it.”  
Cosette nodded, but she still looked unhappy. She tried for a smile, but it ended up in a grimace, the face of a woman not knowing how to let someone down gently and facing the fact that she had to spend the entire rest of the day with a person who had unrequited feelings for her.  
Éponine sighed. This whole thing had turned into a disaster within seconds. It was probably best to cut her losses.  
“Maybe we should stop. We already got a ton of stuff, we'll just divvy it up and then ... go home.”  
“Yeah, okay,” Cosette said, finally putting down the hot water bottle in Montparnasse's lap. Éponine had almost forgotten that he was there. She kept staring at Cosette who looked around the room, looking terribly lost, searching for words that wouldn't come to her.   
“I'll let you have the cake,” Éponine suggested, hoping that would cheer her up. It did not.  
“No, that's okay. That's not really why I ... I should go.”  
Éponine managed to scramble together enough manners to see Cosette off at the door, but not enough willpower not to stand at the top of the stairs and watch her leave. Only Montparnasse silently judging her prevented her from running to the window to catch one last glimpse of her.  
“I think she was about to cry,” Éponine said when she returned to Parnasse's living room, collapsing on the couch, stealing his hot water bottle for herself. “That's just like her, feeling sad for someone else's heartbreak.”  
Montparnasse was not done judging her.  
“You're such a dumbass,” he said, but left it at that.

Cosette couldn't make it to their next coffee date, nor to the one after that. February turned to March and all that Éponine had to show for the time were a string of unanswered texts. Montparnasse claimed it was because Cosette was crushing on her and that she thought Éponine had rejected her, but he also believed narwhals didn't exist, so she took his assessment with a grain of salt. But whatever the reason for Cosette's sudden reticence, she would not let it destroy their friendship. Instead of texting her another hopeful 'coffee after work?' with a carefully selected amount of appropriate emojis, Éponine chose the direct approach.

Climbing the balconies on Cosette's building to her living room window was easy. Finding the living room window closed and having to climb three metres sideways and around a corner into her kitchen window was not. Not falling backwards out of the window when she was halfway through finding Cosette in the middle of the kitchen, a teabag and saucer in her hand, staring at Éponine, was the hardest part.

“Uh,” Éponine said intelligently. Then she grunted as Cosette, dropping both teabag and saucer into the sink dashed forward and pulled Éponine into the room, over the counter, and to the floor.  
“Are you crazy!” she yelled, or as much Cosette ever yelled, which was slightly raising her voice above normal conversation levels. “I live on the seventh floor!”  
“Are you sure it's not the sixth?” Éponine said as she got back up. She could have sworn she only climbed six levels.   
“I'm pretty sure it's the seventh. And that's – that's not even remotely important. Why did you scale the building? I have a front door!”  
Because Éponine had not entirely intended for Cosette to find her. Other people would have rung the door bell, asked to be let in, and then discussed this like normal, adult people. Éponine's plan had been to break in and leave a long apology note together with the last slice of chocolate cake left over from Valentine's day, which she had frozen and then thawed last night, when she realised Cosette would never come to pick it up herself.  
“I have cake,” she offered, taking the box out of her backpack with barely enough presence of mind to rip off the note first.   
“You climbed through my window because you have cake?”  
Éponine looked up at Cosette, realised that this was all going pear-shaped, and shrugged. Cosette sighed, the deep sigh of the defeated, and began setting the table.   
“I was thinking about getting something to eat, anyway,” she said and pulled out a chair for Éponine. She sank into it, placing the cake on their plates while she watched Cosette put on another kettle. 

And then they sat, opposite each other, not touching their cake, each waiting for the other to make the first move.   
Éponine's apology note had been carefully crafted, containing as many half-truths and outright lies as she thought were necessary to preserve their friendship, but now, looking her oldest and closest friend in the eyes, she decided to be honest instead. If anyone in the world would be kind about this, it was Cosette. If anyone in the world deserved to know, it was her. Éponine cleared her throat.  
“I came here to apologise,” she said. Cosette was quiet. She didn't offer judgement, but neither did she give support. She simply looked at her, waiting for Éponine to offer something of value. “I realise that it looked like I lured you on that Valentine's thing on false pretenses. I never meant to make you do something you didn't want to do, and I had no ulterior motives for this whole thing, honestly.” She started speaking faster, Cosette's continued silence fanning the flames of her unease. “And honestly, I didn't even realise I was in love with you until we kissed the first time. It must have been going on for years, but I always thought I just liked you as a friend, and then that happened, and the penny dropped, so to speak.”  
Cosette gasped but Éponine needed to finish her little speech before she ran out of steam. “I should have told you then, but I thought it's okay, I don't expect anything to come out of this, right? We both know you're way out of my league, but I guess when I talked to Montparnasse, I kind of made it sound like-”  
“Ponpon. Shut up.”  
Éponine barely had a chance to realise that Cosette had spoken up after all, when Cosette leaned over the table and kissed her.  
This was nothing like the first kiss. This was bruising, possessive, Cosette gripping the collar of Éponine's jacket and pulling her in, kissing her within an inch of her life.   
“I love you, but you're so dense sometimes,” Cosette murmured against her lips and then she was back to kissing her. Eventually Éponine got with the program and, euphoria and confusion having an internal battle for dominance, she gave up, rounded the table, pushed Cosette's chair back and lowered herself into her lap. Cosette took Éponine's face between her hands, her kisses turning into gentle pecks on the corner of her lips, her cheeks, the tip of her nose.   
“You love me?” Éponine asked, just as she began wondering if she hadn't imagined that part.  
“I've loved you for years,” Cosette said. “I wanted to tell you, but the time was never right. When you asked me to pretend to be your girlfriend, I thought that was the perfect time. I'd simply ask you to keep this going for more than one day, but then-”  
“-Then I claimed it was all just a fluke.” Also explaining why Montparnasse kept calling her a dumbass. “I'm sorry, princess, really.”  
Cosette smiled and, giggling happily, buried her face in the crook of Éponine's neck. She was just about to double down on the princess thing, when the doorbell rang.  
“See?” Cosette said as she gently moved Éponine from her lap to get up. “That's how normal people enter someone's place.”

It was the cops.   
“Miss Fauchelevent? We received a call about a break-in.”  
Éponine had the grace to duck her head in pretend-shame when Cosette threw her a murderous glare. She turned back to the cops, smiling sweetly.  
“I'm so sorry you had to come out here, officer ...” she threw a glance at the name tag. “Javert. The break-in was my - my girlfriend. She was making a romantic gesture.”  
“I see,” said the police officer, who judging from his general bearing and seemingly perpetual frown didn't know the meaning of the word romantic. “Well, try to keep your partner from making any more of these gestures, miss.”  
Éponine, who had a bucket list full of illegal romantic gestures she had come up with in the last two weeks as she pined over Cosette, did not see that happening. 

She watched from the kitchen door as Cosette assured the officer that all their activities would be strictly wholesome, then grinned when Cosette finally got him to leave, closed the door and rounded in on Éponine.  
“You!”  
Éponine laughed and threw her hands up.   
“Come on, you kinda liked, admit it.”  
Cosette softened and let herself be pulled in by Éponine.  
“It was kind of romantic,” she admitted.  
“Then you're gonna love what I have planned for your birthday.”  
Cosette drew back, doubting.   
“It's not anything illegal, is it?”  
Éponine extracted herself from Cosette's arms, all but skipping along as she made her way back into the kitchen to take care of the whistling kettle.  
“Ponpon! I'm not committing crimes on my birthday!”  
“It's completely legal, I promise.”  
A promise worth about as much as a platonic Valentine's day scam.


End file.
